AS TOLD TO BC PIRES

My name is Michael “ESK” Escalante and, in 1995, I went up against Republic Bank and beat them to keep my ponytail as a bank teller.

I come from everywhere in Trinidad. Born in Park Nursing Home, now St Clair Medical Centre.

First five years I lived in Caroni. I moved from there to Ste Madeleine. Cedar Hill. Todd’s Road. Philippine. Stone Street. Dundonald Hill. Maraval.

The only place I ent live yet is Toco, Tobago and the Deep South. I’m a Trinidadian.

Get it correct. My nickname is pronounced Ess-Kay, like the letters S and K put together, not Esky.

When my father worked Caroni, they sent a wedding invitation to “Mr S K.” I inherited that nickname from my father.

I make a mistake and named my four-year-old daughter Elizabeth Yolande Escalante. For her to start writing that name go be real pressure! By the time she finished writing out her name in school, class done! As opposed to somebody named Tricia Lee.

I know how to handle death, to an extent.

My younger brother died when I was three. My father died when I was 19. And I lost a child, Judah, at nine months in the womb before, with a different woman.

My daughter is like a divine intervention. Because her mother, Neela Sooklal, had also had miscarriages. My scenario with Neela, I cannot remember the name of it, is one of those that you can’t pronounce, but pregnancy was a one-in-four million chance.

I believe in a spiritual being. But not God.

Heaven and Hell, yeah, it have to have something like that. Because you have good and bad, yin and yang.

But I never really delved further into that.

Escalante is my name but it's not really my real name.

Gary Griffith is my cousin. His grandfather and my grandfather were brothers.

My grandfather changed his name in the 1940s and nobody in the Escalante family spoke about the Griffith side until I prodded my uncles when I was in my 30s.

The story my father gave me when I was 12 was, my grandfather served in World War I with his brother, 1914-18, and then went to the US, all the time sending money back to Trinidad.

When they came back to Trinidad, my grandfather asked his mother for some of the money he had been sending back, but she had used it to raise the other five kids.

My grandfather got vexed with the family and changed his name to Escalante, in honour of a man who saved his life in WWI.

My uncles left St Mary’s College on Friday as a Griffith and came back to school on Monday as an Escalante.

A man told me about being in class at CIC and the teacher taking roll calling out, “Kenneth Griffith, Kenneth Griffith” – and my uncle ent answering. The teacher pelt the blackboard duster at Uncle Kenny and he catch it and pelt it back at the teacher and said, “My name is Escalante!” And got suspended for two weeks.

I'm not a conventional Trinidad white boy. I get along well with everybody.

That went with my upbringing at possibly the best school in Trinidad, Naparima College.

Very rarely am I called “white boy” any more.

Being small, I had to defend myse

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